


Pathetique

by queenmab_scherzo



Series: Symphony of a Thousand [2]
Category: The Hobbit RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Classical Music, Alternate Universe - Orchestra, Drunk Sex, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-14 03:29:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1251103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenmab_scherzo/pseuds/queenmab_scherzo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard's quartet performs--and celebrates--the night before their flight leaves. Sequel to "Duet".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pathetique

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kt_fairy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kt_fairy/gifts).



> As promised and with apologies; drunk cello-playing for Kt_fairy! Definitely, definitely go read her version ("Valentine") and love it and enjoy it as I have :)

_I am now wholly occupied with the new work … and it is hard for me to tear myself away from it. I believe it comes into being as the best of my works. I must finish it as soon as possible, for I have to wind up a lot of affairs and I must soon go to London._

P. I. Tchaikovsky, 1893

* * *

Lee hardly breathed during all five movements of Bartok. The quartet danced on the knife-edge of unresolved dissonance, over half an hour of air escaping and never regaining lost ground. In the brief silences between movements Lee watched, fingernails blistering his palms, while Richard panted and Martin and Cate pulled torn horse-hair from the ends of their bows, hacked to threads by x-cells and minor ninths and _fortissimos_ and octatonic symmetry.  
  
Lee could barely hold himself up for the standing ovation. Luke beamed and Cate, of course, looked radiant, but his eyes were for Richard’s shy half-smile and the curl of dark hair flung out of place across his forehead.  
  
Richard would try to fix it later, blushing in the nearest bar, surrounded by fawning undergraduates and overly-helpful post-grads, but Lee would grab his hand away and press another beer into his grip to distract him.  
  
The bar died down slowly. Cate was the first to leave, proclaiming beauty sleep. A handful of string faculty followed and the students became more drunk and less interested in the visiting artists.  
  
Lee appreciated the lack of attention as with each drink he found himself bending closer to Richard’s solid warmth. Richard leaned away to whisper something to Martin and Lee felt panic heat his cheeks.  
  
"Wow. No, fine, it's fine," Martin said, his voice sounding far from fine. Richard pulled back again with a smile, and for a split second, his hand found Lee’s lower back. "I hope you enjoy Chicago with your terrific Southern gentleman,” Martin went on. “I'll just stick around here and babysit the drunk Welsh fiddler. Again.”  
  
Lee let out a huff of laughter, or maybe just shocked relief.  
  
"I'll make it up to you," Richard said.  
  
"Fucking right, you will. Maybe I'll drop him off in your room tonight when he can't hold himself up without getting sick.”  
  
"Thanks, Martin," Richard said, dropping a friendly kiss on his cheek and sliding off his barstool.

A little breathless and more than a little torn, Lee offered Martin an awkward smile of his own which was returned with an eyeroll.  
  
Luke drained his pint and slammed it back on the bar with an incoherent declaration about Cardiff and grenadine and Tchaikovksy which probably wouldn't make sense even if Lee could understand the words.  
  
"... No need to thank me. I'm living the dream," Martin sighed.  
  
Richard ducked his head to hide a fond smile and deftly tied his scarf, pulling his peacoat on over and straightening the collar.  
  
Lee hesitated and looked back and forth between Martin and Richard. "Are you sure?" he asked with a wary glance at Luke's listing frame.  
  
Martin gave a hearty roar and wrapped a friendly arm around Luke's shoulders until the taller man was bent uncomfortably to Martin's level. "Of course I'm sure! We're going to have a fucking jolly time, aren't we?”  
  
Luke giggled and then, swift and earnest, his face folded in suspicion. "Are you cutting me off?"  
  
Martin shook him just slightly. His smile was fond, but Lee thought Luke's head wobbled a bit dangerously for such a seemingly kind gesture. "Cutting you off? Mate, I'm buying you shots."  
  
Luke's face lit up. Clearing his throat pointedly, Richard herded Lee toward the exit, offering a good-bye over his shoulder that neither violinist probably heard or cared about.

* * *

After the next bar--one of those crowded affairs full of strange faces, and more intimate for it--and a round of drinks later, Lee found his arm inside Richard's wool coat and wrapped around his waist. He wasn't sure who was supporting who, but they took up less space on the hotel elevator, that way. And Lee discovered he could discreetly tuck cold fingers under Richard's waist band without the trio of girls in their early 20s noticing.  
  
The hotel room, a standard upscale en suite, felt cozy and humid to their cold-pinked ears. Richard slurred something about leaving the heat too high, but Lee already had his back pressed flat to the door, tugging at the shoulders of his heavy coat.  
  
He kissed Richard then, insistent and thrumming with pent up need, all rough, chapped lips and at odds with the warmth of the room. A gasp shuddered in Richard's chest and Lee took the opportunity to wind his tongue around cold teeth. His fingers opened and closed around the fabric at Richard's ribcage and a needy whine sounded in the back of his throat. His head fogged up and he thought there was only one thing on his mind, until—  
  
"Play cello for me," Lee said, surprising both of them. The demand was unexpected but unavoidable, a low growl that started where their hipbones were pressed together and ended in Richard's mouth.  
  
He chuckled, and pushed Lee back, just a fraction, not away, but enough to come up for air.  
  
"I wouldn't know what to play.”  
  
"Something Romantic." The words slipped past Lee's brain without any warning, and he could have called them back, or at least specified—Romantic, not _romantic_.  
  
Richard's eyelids fluttered. He rooted himself deeper to the floor, somehow both leaning away and curling forward at the same time, indecision stitched up his stiff limbs.  
  
"I think we've both had our fill of Brahms," Richard said.  
  
Lee chuckled. "I like others too. ... Except Wagner. I mean, of course I like Wagner's music. It's just... Dont—"  
  
Richard waved a hand to cut him off. Cut off the educated musician's never-ending moral dilemma. He grinned, and a hint of pink tongue stuck between his teeth. Lee felt an unstoppable swell in his chest; an apoggiatura that would fall, inevitably, maybe after a long and winding harmonic progression but _always_ , simply because it was supposed to.  
  
In the time it took his blood to light, Richard had his case open and resting on the bed. He took rosin to his bow, ran his hand once up and down its length before Lee hopped forward. "Let me," he said, not sure why they were still speaking in code like teenagers, but his eyes felt big and his heart felt big as he gently ran the rosin end-to-end across the bow.  
  
Richard lifted the cello easily from its case, straddled the corner of the bed, and swung the cello between his legs as if it wasn't ancient or fragile or worth more than some entire cello sections.  
  
Lee adopted his most endearing pout. "I thought that's where I would go," nodding at the Guaragnini settled between Richard's knees.  
  
Richard ran his fingers from the bridge up the neck of the fine instrument, parsing them easily between the strings. He curled around the long slopes of wood, closing his eyes thoughtfully. Lee tried to swallow. A pang of jealousy cut him down, this sharp hammerstroke that shocked his blood, and while he felt an urge to twist the cello aside and drop to his knees and ensconce himself there at Richard's waist, he also found himself transfixed at the sight the pair made, the perfect fit, as if he were made for the cello and the cello for him. Lee felt it burn him deep how much he wanted both; to watch Richard play for the rest of his life, and also to slot himself in its place and never let go.  
  
Lee knelt before them, face to face with the bridge and the slope of strings, still but coiled with energy, dipped in the liquid of potential sound, and he thought they were untouchable.  
  
It struck Lee how easy it looked, simple tools fastened across an ancient machine. He realized they could live in this art, marveled at how two men from two different continents could lean together in a dark hotel room and participate in this pillar of human achievement, in the vast tradition of creative potential, packed and pressurized in metal and wood. A wave of heat swept from his chest to burn behind his eyes at the thought.  
  
"Play something?" he said again, and this time it wasn't a demand, but a question, a hesitant whisper directed at pearly, knotted wood.  
  
His gaze flickered up to Richard's face, temple leant against the cello scroll, eyes closed and a gentle line wrinkled between his brows. Then he smiled, easy and weightless.  
  
He swept the bow across his lowest string and Lee felt the reverberation in his kneecaps.  
  
"Oh, bugger, I haven't tuned," Richard said. His eyes looked glassy.  
  
"I don't care.”  
  
Richard muttered vague protests but whatever he said didn't convince him to tune. Instead [he launched into song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvEzdij0dlk), a sudden melody that was both flippant and profound, a long cascade that never reached solid ground, falling up and over nothing like silk on wind.  
  
As if pulled onto a dance floor, Lee found himself rocking back and forth to the wave of music. He laughed out loud. "I can’t—I feel like I'm going to fall over!”  
  
Richard's smile curled tighter but he didn't stop.  
  
"What are you doing?!" Lee demanded, his head twisted and giddy. The rhythm was false and easy, effortlessly off-balance. Lee caught himself from falling over at every turn of phrase. "I can't dance to this! You're drunk!”  
  
"I'm not drunk, the waltz is drunk!”  
  
Lee tried to bring tangents to focus. He tapped out a waltz rhythm against his thigh and almost toppled to the floor.  
  
"That's not a waltz!”  
  
"It is."  
  
Richard sighed into a cadence and his bow drifted to the side.  
  
The motes of silence pressed at Lee's limbs and he breathed softly, the sound swallowed up in empty air. Tears pricked his eyes and he felt a jolt through the heat, a sudden fire of stunned realization and inexplicable fear.  
  
"That was Tchaikovsky!”  
  
Richard's lips parted and he nodded. His knuckles were white against the neck of his instrument.  
  
"Why did you play that?”  
  
Richard stood up, his long limbs slow and stiff. He didn't answer.  
  
Lee asked, "Isn't Tchaik 6 really sad?"  
  
 _Well put, Dr. Pace. 'Tchaikovsky's sixth is sad.' What an eloquent analysis. A decade of music education wasn't lost on you._  
  
Richard hummed a vague affirmation. Or Lee hoped it was affirmation. It was difficult to tell, with Richard's back turned as he gently placed his instrument in its case.  
  
Lee shook off the instant of sobriety and pulled himself to his feet, enveloping Richard from behind, loosening his tie and untucking his dress shirt.  
  
He pressed a hint of teeth through the fabric at his shoulder. “You don’t have to put it away,” he said.  
  
Richard fastened the closures on the case and turned in Lee's arms. Lee hardly had time to smile before Richard's hand grasped at his lower back and he captured him in a kiss, fingers catching in his shirt and pulling it free with a clumsy tremble.  
  
Inhaling a moan, Lee snuck a knee between Richard's thighs and pushed him back into the pristine comforter. Lee couldn’t remember removing Richard’s shirt, but there it was, that pale expanse of hard muscle pressed against his bare skin again, familiar but reverberating with something new, as a melody returning in a minor mode. Richard arched up into him, a sinuous roll that plucked the strings of his nerves, and Lee choked on a whimper.  
  
They discarded pants in a dirty, careless haze. In the early morning hours Lee would spend several hungover minutes determining which pair belonged to whom, but now losing them was far more important and desperate an issue than finding them in the future.  
  
"Where do you go next?"  
  
Richard hummed thoughtfully and tucked his face into Lee’s shoulder. Lee knew why. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked.  
  
Then Richard spoke up, his lips moving warm and solid, murmuring against his skin, even as they spelled out disquiet and an empty pillow.  
  
“Eastman.” A kiss. “Carnegie.” Another kiss. “Then Yale.” A sigh of hot breath curling around Lee’s bicep. “Then home.”  
  
“Back to London?”  
  
Richard nodded. Lee bent close, pressed his forehead into Richard’s temple, confided kisses along his jawline, and Richard let him.  
  
"Why did you play Tchaik 6?”  
  
The words were warm breath on skin, impermanent and cooling even as lips gently traced them there.  
  
Richard growled, the rugged throb of an open C-string, and crushed Lee’s body against his, pulling it in and begging with a wordless groan.  
  
Without hesitation, Lee obeyed. He ran his hands across every inch of exposed skin, stroking warmth into the cold patches, fingering a pre-dominant into ribs and thighs and hip-bones just to feel it all shudder under his touch.  
  
Four hours later, before the sunrise, Richard would come back to him. He would tug at Lee’s sleep-numb wrists, rubbing a pulse back into them with calloused thumbprints, practice a lazy _adagio_ across tendons and delicate bones. He would slide his thighs around Lee’s hips and play him like a fine stringed instrument. He would spread out under him, muted and pliable, molded to fit as easily as if they had the time for it.  
  
But this, tonight, was a hasty cross-motif, brass chords in a sizzling tessitura. This pushed and pulled in a sharp, ever-present need for resolution. This bit involuntary groans into collar bones. This was sight-reading on stage; raw and deliberate; unrushed, but sparked with acute consciousness.  
  
Lee tried to memorize the patterns even as they were packed tight with complex suspension.

He didn’t have time for more questions so he asked with an unsteady rhythm, asked between dissonant intervals and the heady drag of resolution. And Richard played it out for him, posed questions in return, brought them to a searing cadence and a long lament, but never divulged an explanation. It was a program, Lee felt it in the heat of muscle and a dominant pedal and the subtle sigh of tonic. It unfolded there for him to feel but never to read, the cruel last notes of a love letter in a foreign language.  
  
In the morning, Lee would drag his feet from the hotel into unwelcome sunlight, Richard’s information saved and saved twice to his phone, and he would hold those warm chords inside his chest against the gray cold.

**Author's Note:**

> The "waltz" that has Lee tripping over himself is the second movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony. You should listen.


End file.
